Another mass protest in France. Another confrontation between French citizens and their government. Why does this keep happening?

France is once more convulsing from protests that have grown in scale and intensity. See AP, WSJ and NYT. I am neither writing to explain the reasons for these latest protests nor to compare them with prior mass protest movements in France. Rather, I am curious whether there is something particular about France or its history that makes protest such a powerful part of French political life.

Perhaps your first thought is the legacy of the French Revolution. It was mine, too. But what does a revolution that began in 1789 actually explain about French citizens taking to the streets today? What connects the overthrow of a monarchy more than two centuries ago to a protest over pensions, schools, or government policy?

That connection is what interests me. How does a history of revolution shape what people believe they can demand from their government — and what they can do when their government refuses?

Those questions led me to Professor Robert Gildea, a historian of modern France. Along the way, I also drew on my conversations with historians of America, Britain, Russia, and Iran. Together, those conversations helped me explore what might distinguish French protests — and why the distinction matters.

Are French Protests Different?

Protests are hardly unique to France. Americans protest. The British protest. And people across Europe often take to the streets when they can no longer tolerate government corruption, mismanagement, or repression. But do the frequency, consequences, and spirit of French protests distinguish them from those in other countries?

Frequency

Doesn’t it feel like the French protest more frequently than other nations?

Notice my use of the word “feel”. I pose the question as such because a data-centered comparative analysis may reveal that other countries, such as Iran, which I’ll discuss below, erupt in mass protests more frequently. So I suspect that perception has a much bigger role in how we view France than hard facts. And that perception may partly be founded on our historical and news-based comparison of France to other Western democracies. Regardless of whether it’s a matter of fact or perception, France has experienced numerous major protests. Below are a few examples that have been reported in American news media.

Just three years ago, the French government was scrambling to respond to the pension protests (January to June 2023). And the massive Yellow Vest protests (November 2018 to June 2020) had ended just three years before that. So, counting the current protests, that’s three massive, nationwide French protest movements that have occurred during or extended into the 2020s.

What’s striking is that American adults who keep up with Western European news can probably name many other major French protests within their own lifetime. Examples include the 2005 Suburban Riots, the 1990 Urban Riots, the 1995 Public Sector Strikes, and the 1998 Student Protests.

I particularly remember the 1998 protests by about half a million high school students. I was in law school at the time learning about Constitutional history and the Civil Rights movement and its nationwide protests in the 1950s and ’60s. The 1998 Student Protests are doubly interesting because they resonate with France’s current nationwide general strike which is, in part, a protest against poor conditions in their public schools.

It’s hard for me to remember, let alone name and identify, other European countries that have experienced so many massive protests since the 1990s. And that’s just since the 1990s!

You may rightly point out that we also have had large-scale protests in America since the 1990s. By way of example, researchers estimated 3.3–5.3 million participants in the 2017 Women’s March and 1.2–2.0 million in the 2018 March for Our Lives. The 2020 George Floyd protests were even larger as a sustained movement, with estimates of 15–26 million participants over several weeks.

So, do the French actually protest more frequently than other nations? I haven’t established that in this essay, partly because our perception of French protests may be as important as their actual frequency. And perhaps that’s not the most revealing question anyway.

What strikes me about France is not simply how often its citizens take to the streets, but that French protests have sometimes become something far more consequential: revolutions that have transformed the country’s political order.

Consequence

In the history of France, have mass protests played an unusually prominent role in overturning its political order?

Well, consequence is such a loaded word. Multiple books can be written to answer the above question. So I decided to approach the answer from a less analytical and more observational angle. Let me illustrate my point below. And to do that, let’s establish a benchmark before identifying consequential French protests.

The American Revolutionary War ended in 1783 — six years before the French Revolution began. How many revolutions has America had since 1783? And how many revolutions in America have changed the American system of government?

The English had their Glorious Revolution in 1688–101 years before the French Revolution began. How many revolutions have the English had since 1688? And how many revolutions have changed the English system of government?

Even in Russia, which had its own share of massive uprisings and violent revolutions, such as the Russian Revolution of 1905, the House of Romanov continuously ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917.

In comparison, since the French Revolution that began in 1789 and ultimately overthrew the House of Bourbon, which had ruled France since 1589, France has experienced five republics — 1792, 1848, 1870, 1946, and 1958 — not to mention the kings and emperors who took power and were then toppled in between.

The point here is not to enumerate every revolution and rebellion in France’s history. Rather, it is to bring focus to a striking aspect of protests in France: their frequent success in toppling the country’s political order.

So France’s history seems to suggest a recurring relationship between popular protest and fundamental political change. But why has that relationship endured in France? And what does it reveal about how French citizens understand their relationship with government?

French Revolutionary Spirit

In addition to frequency and consequence, let’s consider whether revolution occupies a distinctive place in France’s historical memory and political culture.

To examine this, it may be helpful to take a glimpse at how we Americans think of France. And I’ll illustrate that with a simple example.

We Americans tend to assess revolutions from the perspective of our own history. We see revolutions as extremely rare events. Perhaps our perspective is influenced by the fact that we have not had a regime-changing revolution in America since the American Revolution.

So it is not surprising that when shown the image below, Americans may think it’s a depiction of the French Revolution that began in 1789, which, in reality, is probably the best-known French revolution among Americans. I actually tested this hypothesis with some friends and family members.

Although this image is from a revolution in France, it does not depict the famous French Revolution of 1789. What most people fail to appreciate is that Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting, which I am betting most Americans have seen before, commemorates the French Revolution of 1830, not the world-changing French Revolution of 1789. And there is more.

Most Americans know of the Broadway musical Les Misérables. Well, that’s not about the French Revolution of 1789 either. It’s about the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris.

How does this relate to our investigation?

These examples remind us that the French Revolution of 1789 was not the end of France’s revolutionary history. Other uprisings followed, and some became embedded in cultural works familiar even to Americans.

But does this recurring history of revolution help explain something deeper about French political culture — and the relationship between French citizens and their government?

Why Does Revolution Matter to the French?

France’s recurring revolutions raise questions that go well-beyond the frequency of its citizens’ protest or how often French governments have fallen as a result. These questions reframe how we view the history of protests in France and how they may compare to protests in other countries. And the following questions may reveal a foundational difference in French character.

First, what place does revolution occupy in the French understanding of political authority? Second, how might that historical inheritance shape the relationship between citizens and their government today?

I put these questions to Professor Robert Gildea in 2023, when France was experiencing another wave of mass demonstrations, this time over President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms.

Prof. Gildea is particularly well positioned to help us with these questions. He is an award-winning historian and Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Oxford University who has spent more than four decades exploring France’s turbulent history, revolutionary traditions, and political culture.

A winner of the prestigious Wolfson History Prize, Prof. Gildea’s acclaimed books include

— Children of the Revolution,

— Marianne in Chains, and

— Fighters in the Shadows.

Our conversation took us from medieval peasant revolts to the French Revolution, the barricades of nineteenth-century Paris, the upheavals of 1968, and the Yellow Vest movement.

What interests me most, however, is not simply the history of these uprisings. Rather, it is what Prof. Gildea’s historical perspective might reveal about the relationship between the French people and their government.

Is Revolution France’s Founding Myth?

To be sure, we are talking here about the French Revolution that began in 1789. Prof. Gildea described that Revolution as France’s “founding myth”. And the phrase is worth examining.

The Revolution became a historical reference point through which later generations understood their political struggles. Even after the monarchy returned, even after France became an empire, and even after republics were established, the Revolution remained unfinished in the minds of many French citizens.

Consider, for example, the June Rebellion of 1832, which inspired Victor Hugo’s 1862 epic novel Les Misérables. The rebellion illustrates this sense of unfinished revolution. Just two years earlier, the July Revolution of 1830 had overthrown King Charles X, only to replace him with another monarch, King Louis-Philippe. For republicans who wanted to end monarchy altogether, the revolution had fallen short of its promise. So the June Rebellion of 1832 was, in part, an attempt to challenge that outcome.

As I see it, a recurring theme in post-1789 French history is the belief that the Revolution’s promises remained unfulfilled — or worse, that the Revolution had been outright betrayed by subsequent governments. For the French who held this belief, 1789 remained a source of inspiration and political legitimacy.

This is also a central theme of Professor Gildea’s book, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799–1914, which we discussed during our conversation.

The book examines how successive generations of French citizens inherited, interpreted, and sometimes rejected the revolutionary legacy. The generation that helped inspire the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 did not understand revolution in precisely the same way as the generation that subsequently sought to establish a stable republic. Nevertheless, they were all, in Prof. Gildea’s formulation, children of the Revolution. And that revolutionary inheritance included a particularly consequential idea about who ultimately possesses political authority.

Do “the People” Govern France?

Prof. Gildea introduced a French expression that caught my attention: le peuple. It means “the people.”

That might not sound particularly remarkable. After all, Americans also believe in popular sovereignty. In fact, our government derives its legitimacy from the people. But Prof. Gildea explained that the French understanding of “the people” has a distinctive historical character.

In France, le peuple is not merely an abstract constitutional principle. “The people” can also be understood as possessing political authority and a mandate that extend beyond the ballot box.

We ordinarily think of citizens exercising political authority through elections. We elect representatives, who then govern on our behalf. But what happens when citizens believe their representatives no longer represent them?

In the French revolutionary tradition Prof. Gildea describes, the people do not necessarily have to wait for the next election to assert their political authority — like we tend to do here in America. They can take to the streets to push for change, including changing the political order.

In doing so, the French may believe they are exercising a legitimate democratic right. As it turns out, that right is predicated on a very French concept of their government’s legitimacy.

More Than a Right to Protest: Government “on Probation”

In researching the history of the French Revolution in preparation for my interview with Prof. Gildea, I stumbled on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a fascinating document for which the Marquis de Lafayette prepared an early draft with assistance from Thomas Jefferson. However, the final text adopted by France’s National Constituent Assembly in 1789 emerged from multiple proposals and collective debate, including a major contribution by Abbé Sieyès, a French Catholic priest and leading political theorist of the Revolution.

As someone who is deeply interested in the history of America’s founding (see our program’s special series on the American Revolution), I naturally keyed in on the French Declaration to see if it resonated with the American Declaration of Independence. What I discovered in the French Declaration was astounding. So, naturally, I asked Prof. Gildea about it.

Prof. Gildea explained that the two documents shared important principles, including the equality and fundamental rights of individuals.

But then he drew my attention to a particular provision of the French declaration. Alongside liberty, property, and security, the declaration recognized resistance to oppression as a fundamental right. That surprised me.

Resistance to oppression was not merely an act that might be tolerated. It was identified as a right.

Then Prof. Gildea introduced an even more radical provision from the Declaration of 1793.

Its final article declared that when government violated the rights of the people, insurrection became the people’s most sacred right and most indispensable duty.

I stopped him: Insurrection?

Yes, insurrection.

Prof. Gildea explained that although the Constitution of 1793 was never implemented, the principle expressed in its declaration was still revealing. And the principle is this: government existed to protect the rights of the people. If it violated those rights, citizens were entitled to resist it.

Prof. Gildea characterized this relationship with a phrase I found particularly memorable: government is “on probation.”

Think about that. Is that how we perceive the U.S. government?

I should clarify this question. I don’t mean a specific presidential administration or Congress. What I am referring to is our form of government.

So, as applied to our country, the question is really this: do Americans think that the constitutional order itself remains “on probation”?

The answer is some probably do. In fact, we have suffered through a civil war and also amended our constitution many times. What’s more is that our nation was founded on the recognition of people’s right to alter or abolish a government that violates the rights of its peoples. I am, of course, referring to the Declaration of Independence.

So the distinction cannot simply be that the French recognized a right of resistance and Americans did not.

It may have been the case that the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution and the early Republic were on probation in the eyes of some. Many scholars whom I have interviewed about America’s founding have discussed how its revolutionary fervor changed and even moderated as the republic became established. So in America we didn’t experience the same succession of revolutions and changes of regime as France, although the Civil War and Reconstruction profoundly transformed the republic.

Why, then, did France’s and America’s related revolutionary principles have such different afterlives?

Of course, I do not mean to suggest that modern French protesters are invoking the Declaration of 1793 every time they demonstrate against a government policy. Nor am I suggesting that every demonstration constitutes a revolution.

Regardless, the above point raises a question worth exploring: might France’s revolutionary inheritance, as exemplified by the Declaration of 1793, help explain why resistance to government authority occupies such a prominent place in French political culture?

The answer may be that for some French citizens, taking to the streets is not necessarily a rejection of democracy. Rather, it can be an expression of what they understand democracy to mean.

This also compels a British comparison: why didn’t protests in Britain produce a similar succession of revolutions during and after the French revolutionary era? This is an important discussion, which, in the interest of brevity, I will not explore in this essay. Nevertheless, I strongly encourage you to watch my interview with Prof. Gildea for a detailed analysis of Britain’s response to riots and rebellions.

I should, however, note that during the French Revolution, prominent members of Britain’s political class and aristocracy feared that a similar revolution might occur in Britain. One such prominent politician was Edmund Burke, the Irish member of the British parliament who wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France, a seminal book that became a defining tract of modern conservatism. Specifically, Burke sharply contrasted the events in France with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Britain, arguing that the French Revolution was a destructive, abstract rupture with tradition rather than a conservative defense of historic liberties.

How Revolution Inspires Later Protests

Another guest on my program, Dr. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, who was at Princeton University at the time of our interview, asked me a question that may be relevant to the history of French uprisings. He asserted that “people, most often, people starve to death before they go protest”, and then asked me why I thought Iranians have repeatedly risen up in massive protests since Iran’s 1979 Revolution — despite the regime’s violent and savage repression of protests?

This was his answer to his own question:

In Iran, it seems like now every two, three years, we have a new kind of mode of expression of dissent, you know. And the Iranians and that expression of dissent is the most important cultural transformation, I believe, that has happened since the 1979 revolution. And I do believe that it has to, it’s in genealogy, it goes back to that 1979 revolution.

That once a nation, once a subject asserts itself and demands to be recognized and demands respect, then it’s very, very hard to push that subject back into a box and say that, no, you do what I tell you to do. It doesn’t happen. And this is what the revolution, 79, has done.

In effect, his answer was that because their 1979 revolution ended Iran’s millennia-long political order, Iranians believe they can do it again.

These words resonate with what Prof. Gildea had to say about revolutions in France:

And I think there is, in a sense, because they brought down the state, they brought down the monarchy during the French Revolution…. So in a sense, because they do challenge the state, because they have ended governments and ended regimes, there’s a feeling that they can do it. They have done it and they can do it.

So the underlying idea seems to apply similarly to the people of France as well as the people of Iran: once they succeeded in toppling the Ancien Régime, they were emboldened by the belief that they could do it again.

But believing a revolution is possible does not explain what makes a revolution. Just look at the Russians after the 1917 revolutions. They toppled their old order. But the Soviet regime that followed endured for decades, and its eventual collapse did not follow the same revolutionary path as 1917. Nor have they been able to remove the Putin regime through mass protests.

Defining Revolution

We have thrown about the term revolution without really defining it. The definition matters because France’s history includes both protests that challenged government policy and revolutions that overturned governing regimes. So what is a revolution and when do revolutions happen?

This question became relevant to current events in 2022, when the Mahsa Amini mass protests seemed to be tilting Iran towards an all-out regime-changing revolution. And it should be noted that for many Iranian protestors in 2022, Iran’s 1979 Revolution was within living memory. So to understand what a revolution is and assess for myself whether or not the Mahsa Amini protests could morph into a revolution, I invited Dr. Naghmeh Sohrabi to our program and asked her this question point blank: what is a revolution?

Dr. Sohrabi teaches classes on the history of revolutions, including Iran’s 1979 revolution. She likened the difficulty of defining a revolution to describing the image that one sees in a kaleidoscope. Every time one’s hand moves, the image changes. And that’s what defining a revolution is like — like trying to describe an object that is constantly changing.

Given that it’s difficult to define revolutions, she challenged me to reconsider any assumptions that revolutions must succeed or that revolutions are inherently violent. She then posed a more fundamental question: why should there be a revolution at all? Revolutions are not natural phenomena. They are rare.

Although I had not recalled it at the time, earlier in 2022, another scholar had implicitly pointed to the rarity of revolutions in a different context. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, I invited Dr. Mark Steinberg, an expert in the history of revolutions in Russia, to explain the history of Russian revolutions during wars. The phrase that stays with me from my interview with him is the Russian refrain “we can’t live this way anymore”.

That phrase stuck with me because it highlights the rarity of revolutions in Russia. It demonstrates how much Russians tolerated their oppressive governments — to the point that they could no longer continue living as they did.

Rarity of revolutions came up again in our program about America’s founding, for which I invited Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld of University of Pennsylvania to discuss the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions. In our interview, Dr. Rosenfeld echoed Dr. Sohrabi’s proposition:

Revolutions are rare. Most of the time, people might grumble about things, but they take the world to be largely as things are. We accept all kinds of things in daily life that someday somebody is going to say about us, how could they have lived that way?

So, in effect, these scholars redirect my investigation to the following question instead: if people usually accommodate themselves to the existing order — if they put up with hardship and repression, then what circumstances lead to revolution?

Two scholars in my program have answered this all-important question from two different but related perspectives. One is Prof. Gildea and the other is Steven Pincus of the University of Chicago.

Dr. Gildea and I arrived at this question in our conversation when I asked him to define revolutions by distinguishing between a riot, rebellion, a revolt and a revolution.

He explained that the terminology often reflects the perspective of the person describing the event. One person’s riot may be another person’s uprising. As true and helpful as this may be, I was hoping for a clear definition that would simplify my research. And Prof. Gildea did not disappoint.

Drawing on a formulation associated with Lenin, Prof. Gildea identified three conditions.

First, there must be a substantial popular movement. Workers, peasants, or other groups must mobilize against the existing order.

Second, the ruling class must become divided. Some members of the political or social establishment must break with the existing leadership and support the popular movement.

Third, the state itself must experience a crisis, whether financial, military, institutional, or one of political legitimacy.

The second and third points particularly stood out for me because they present the top down approach to studying revolutions, not the bottom-up approach of mass movements that shake an existing order.

Dr. Pincus, who has written extensively on comparative revolutions, identified a common feature among revolutions: that the existing political order — the old regime, “has to have come to a prior decision that they need… to have state modernization.”

He further explained that the decision by an existing regime to modernize may be predicated on a perception of geopolitical weakness and/or economic backwardness. And, as he described it, this was exactly the case in France because “before the French Revolution, Louis XVI decided that he needed to modernize the collection of the nature of the national debt in France.”

Incidentally, drawing from my interview with Dr. Sohrabi, I think Dr. Pincus’s argument might also help explain Iran’s 1979 revolution in the context of policies that thrust Iran toward modernization, i.e., rapid urbanization and industrialization in the 1970s.

Dr. Pincus’s argument brings focus to the decisions of the governing class — those in power. This helped me better appreciate that understanding revolution required looking beyond the protesters themselves.

It goes without saying that these conditions describe an opening for revolution, rather than a guarantee that one will occur or succeed. By way of example, the emergence of the American Revolution, which was initially a rebellion for more British rights rather than a revolution, depended on a multitude of factors, including international support.

Regardless of their intensity, persistence, and/or success, these distinctions matter when we watch contemporary demonstrations.

A mass protest may disrupt a country, compel a government to reconsider its policies, or even contribute to the resignation of political leaders. But that does not necessarily make it a revolution. A change of leaders can leave the underlying political order intact. The question is whether that order itself is being challenged and transformed. The French have experienced both. And the historical memory of successful revolutions can shape the expectations of citizens participating in movements that fall well short of revolution.

Just One Point

At the end of my interviews, I ask my guests a question: if they wanted our viewers and listeners to remember just one point from our hour-long conversation, what would it be? I began this tradition almost by accident six years ago. But I continued it because I recognized that some of the most profound and unexpected observations and conclusions emerge at this point. At this point, some scholars add a wow-factor. And sometimes those wow-factors undermine everything I thought I was digesting throughout the interview.

So after everything we discussed, I asked Prof. Gildea: if he wanted our audience to remember just one point about the French revolutionary spirit, what would it be?

His answer was unexpected, as my guest scholar’s answers often are.

He pointed to La Marseillaise, France’s national anthem.

As he told the story, during the protests against President Macron’s pension reforms in 2023, opposition politicians stood in parliament and sang the anthem after the government used a constitutional procedure to advance the reforms without a vote on the legislation.

Why was that significant?
Because La Marseillaise is a revolutionary song.

Written in 1792, during the French revolutionary wars, it calls citizens to defend the nation against tyranny and its enemies. Prof. Gildea read several lines from the anthem in English translation. The words were striking. They invoked tyranny, armed citizens, and the defense of the revolutionary nation.

Forward children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived, the bloody standard of tyranny has been waved against us. To armed citizens, draw up your battalions, so that the impure blood will soak our furrows.

I asked Professor Gildea whether those were not extraordinarily powerful words for members of a modern parliament to sing. He agreed, but reminded me that this was France’s national anthem, sung on official occasions and familiar to generations of French citizens.

He described it as carrying a powerful message of patriotism, revolution, and national pride. And I found the symbolism remarkable.

Here were opposition politicians challenging their government by singing the national anthem — a song born from revolution and filled with the language of resistance.

The same anthem that represents the French Republic also recalls the revolutionary struggle from which its political traditions emerged.

As I reflected on our conversation, the revolutionary spirit seems woven into French culture itself. Even into the national anthem.